ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the world heritage enterprise that finds form in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) registers, lists and conventions. It argues that tensions between heritage and digital media may be productive for the figuring of both; the palpable performativity of the latter holds open the potential for a different relationship to memory from what Memory of the World (MoW) would seem to allow. World heritage and the operations by which universal value is measured are inextricable from MoW and inform the dialogue between heritage and memory in that context. The MoW programme, founded by UNESCO in 1992, came in response to the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo. The digital medium is implicated in the process to the extent that the digital document is compatible with a model of memory composed of finite parts, i.e. virtual memory.
